Girl Relaxing in the Pool

I spent a whole day creating a small animation in Blender of a girl relaxing in the pool.

While it is currently winter in the northern hemisphere, with snow outside, I'm missing summer. Sitting outside, soaking in the sun while floating in a pool, lake, or the ocean.

So I created this animation to help cope.

Supplies

For this project, I used Blender 5.0 and After Effects

Blender is completely free and open-source, while After Effects is a paid program. However, there are many free editing programs that can be used as alternatives.

Step 1: Inspiration

The look I'm going for is similar to the low-poly style of the early 3D Pokémon games. Additionally, this artist, @Priichu (pictured on the right), creates low-poly models with flat, stylized 2D textures.

I don't usually create any concept art and prefer to change is as a go along and just go from the vision in my mind

Step 2: Model Guidelines

I imported this guideline into blender

It's important to remember when modeling a person that their height is usually 8 heads tall.

Step 3: Torso

Using a cube, I deleted the top and bottom faces and started to make a basic torso

Step 4: Legs

using similar methods as the torso, I created the legs, however, I used a mirror modifier to make both legs at the same time

I know I want to keep the model simple and low-poly, so I won't model any detailed toes.

While working throughout, I keep tweaking the torso as well

Make sure you work on both the front angle and the side angle

Step 5: Arms

using the same idea as the legs, I made the arms; however, I didn't follow the guideline because I knew I needed to rig this model, so I left it in an A pose

I know I want to keep the model simple and low-poly, so I won't model any detailed hands or fingers.

Step 6: Head

Now here is the hard part: modeling the head

I created a side guideline using the grease pencil and started to model it. I continue to tweak the shape throughout modeling and ensure that I don't work in one view for too long.

I knew I would draw on the eye texture and create a 2D blink, so I didn't need to model eye holes or a detailed, complex mouth.

Additionally, I created a sphere for the back of my head to follow loosely.

Step 7: Final Model

This is the final model, ready to be textured and rigged

Step 8: Head Texture

For the textures, I started with a simple solid color base for all parts

For the hea,d I had to UV unwrap it and then drew out a guide with grease pencil and followed that

Step 9: Hair

After brainstorming for a bit, I decided to create a plane for the hair

I started with a very low-poly plane that roughly made the shape, and then I beveled it with Ctrl + B and made it smoother

The black and white image is an alpha map, which helps create light and streaky hair without me needing to model it intensely

I copied this idea to the other areas of the head.

Step 10: Swimsuit

For the swimsuit, I duplicated the torso and made an alpha texture to erase certain areas, creating a swimsuit shape without needing to edit the model

Step 11: Blink Expression

For the blink animation:

I copied the eye area from the head

created a unique texture for it

created a shape key that hides the eyes, and another shape key to position it on top of the head.

Creating a blink effect

Step 12: Rigging

For the rig, I used the free Blender addon Rigify and deleted certain parts of the rig, such as the face and hands.

Then I used automatic weight painting for the model

Step 13: Pool Model and Texture

To create a basic pool, I created a cube, sized it to be shallow, and pressed E to extrude the top face down to create a dip

Then, I added a brick texture from Blender's built-in texture library to create the tiles in the pool

Step 14: Pool Water Set Up

For the water, I created a plane, created this texture setup with a Voronoi texture and a mix color node to create a marbling water look

I then used Blender's built-in ocean modifier to create the waves.

To animate the waves, I keyframed the time box. Ensure that the keyframes are set to linear to have them move at a consistent speed.

Step 15: Movement

Parent an empty to a vertex on the water,

Then I will make a child of constraint on the girl and the floatie connected to the empty, and they will follow the wave motion

Step 16: Donut Floatie

The donut floaty is a very simple torus model, with a painted donut texture applied to the model.

I created 3 different textures to make a non-destructive workflow. a solid color texture, a shadow, and a light.

Step 17: Pose

At this point, I pose the model

Step 18: Blink Expression

create shapekeys for the blink and animate the sliders to create a blinking animation

Step 19: Hair Movement

After struggling with a few different solutions, i decided to use a lattice to easily and simply move the hair 'in the breeze' using shapekeys on the lattice

Step 20: Water Droplets

Using spheres with transparency and a blue color as makeshift water, I had animated small beads of water on the donut and the girl

Step 21: Render

final render from blender

Step 22: Post-editing in After Effects

Using After Effects, I utilized an Adobe Stock image I had on hand and applied some masks to create light streaks.

I then created a white solid layer and added circular masks to create light areas, adding depth.

Step 23: Final

After all that hard work, it is done!